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They still make exciting technology. Google's search is still far better than the competition. The Pixel computational photography app is cutting edge. Their tr

by blt 6y ago

They still make exciting technology. Google's search is still far better than the competition. The Pixel computational photography app is cutting edge. Their translation and speech synthesis are great. They are still good at "organizing the world's information". They fail when they try to mimic their competitors. Their cloud services trail Amazon. Their hardware trails Apple. Their social media trails... everybody. You can see it in their intranets. Google uses personal web pages, forums, and search. It is similar to the internet in 2004. Facebook uses a miniature copy of Facebook.

sellyme 6y ago
> Their social media trails... everybody. While it still existed, Google+ was far better than any other popular social media site around. I'm sure I don't need to offer any critique of Facebook, and Twitter's UX was an absolute disaster before they implemented usable threading. Sure, our grandmothers weren't going to start using it, but I've seen what they're posting on Facebook and as far as I'm concerned that was an extreme positive.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  Yep. Google+ became brilliant a couple of years before ot shuttered. It had working pseudonymity. I could also post to different contexts from the same persona. It was easy to read. I experienced little spam and next to no politics. Probably more.
skinkestek 6y ago
> Google's search is still far better than the competition. Bing now gives me results from the customer intranets kind of like an improved version of the old Google Desktop Search. Google has, despite us telling them again and again, "improved" search to the point where it can find thousands of pages that contains something somehow similar to what I searched for, yet completely irrelevant. I.e. not worse than the competitors, just equally bad. Except maybe Google fails in more spectacular ways on search thanks to AI: some of the irrelevant results feel uncanny, like: I can see how they got there, but seriously: it doesn't match what I searched for and it utterly irrelevant.

by blt 6y ago

sellyme 6y ago

> Their social media trails... everybody. While it still existed, Google+ was far better than any other popular social media site around. I'm sure I don't need to offer any critique of Facebook, and Twitter's UX was an absolute disaster before they implemented usable threading. Sure, our grandmothers weren't going to start using it, but I've seen what they're posting on Facebook and as far as I'm concerned that was an extreme positive.

skinkestek 6y ago
Yep. Google+ became brilliant a couple of years before ot shuttered. It had working pseudonymity. I could also post to different contexts from the same persona. It was easy to read. I experienced little spam and next to no politics. Probably more.

skinkestek 6y ago

> Google's search is still far better than the competition. Bing now gives me results from the customer intranets kind of like an improved version of the old Google Desktop Search. Google has, despite us telling them again and again, "improved" search to the point where it can find thousands of pages that contains something somehow similar to what I searched for, yet completely irrelevant. I.e. not worse than the competitors, just equally bad. Except maybe Google fails in more spectacular ways on search thanks to AI: some of the irrelevant results feel uncanny, like: I can see how they got there, but seriously: it doesn't match what I searched for and it utterly irrelevant.